April 30, 2008

Lit without flame by a solar spark, and consuming mere ounces of fuel a day as it is carried by fleet footed runners, the Olympic torch is acquiring a monumental carbon footprint none the less--it is being spirited across the oceans on a dedicated Chinese Airbus 330 belching forth 129 pounds of CO2 for every mile it travels.

In all , Earthlab estimates the jet will consume 462 thousand gallons of fuel- petro, not bio. So it will take 20,130 tonnes of CO2 to see the torch around the world on its meandering 85,000 mile Odyssey from Greece to Beijing

April 25, 2008

Modern conductors face a dilemma. In the bad old days of orchestral performance, they risked a shower of rotten tomatoes and brickbats if they butchered some beloved work of Mozart or Brahms. But works of modern composers are likely to provoke greater ire if perfectly performed/The proprietor of a music minded blog describes a performance of

“Apotheosis of this Earth” by Karel Husa... meant to express the composers displeasure with the terrible way in which man was / is treating the planet earth. It included a number of unusual devices such as instruments playing quarter stepped notes to be deliberately out of tune with others instruments, and sections of the score which direct to play some unspecified notes for a certain amount of time.

These devices seemed to be most often realized at high pitches and high volumes which frequently became physically painful to listen to. It did not help matters that it was being performed in a relatively small “recital hall” space and not a large concert hall which may have been better able to handle the intense sound levels...

Before the music began I had high hopes for something interesting as they brought out 2 marimbas, 2 glockenspiel, 2 xylophones, 2 gongs, tom toms and a set of concert bells, but alas that was before I knew they would be used for evil instead of for good... The conductor stated that this was a piece you would not often hear in a concert, alas he apparently did understand why..."

Audiences can of course prepare themselves for high decibel avant garde music by shooting birds in season or clays if not, the afternoon before a performance , but what about the players?

Symphonies obliged to present avant garde works lest they be accused of philistinism may find relief from orchestral ear damage on the way from Japan. Long home to the mechanical Suzuki method of raising ranks of mindless five year old violinists, its robotics industry has moved on to mechanizing the rest of the orchestra.

The next step is clear -- serious orchestra or opera patrons need AudienceBots to fill their seats during outbursts of Schoenberg, dull acts of Wagner or Husa premieres. Those who come to suffer earnestly will be free to return to the balconies in person while those sensibly seconded by formally attired robots continue their greetings or gossip,or finish their champagne in the intervals that used the most dependable form of modern operatic and orchestral entertainment.

No longer! Now that paintball has become a form of performance art, it is time to turn the tables on the unpleasantness in Ford's theater by encouraging audiences to take pot shots incompetent Cyberconductors, or bean Robo-oboeists that drift off key, without fear of civil suits or manslaughter indictments. Bring the family, but to avoid serious bodily injury, best lay off the percussionist-- hydraulics can cause a world of hurt.

In today's Science , Lewis C. Cantley and John Asara of Harvard announce the results of DNA workup on bones of a T. Rex John Horner, right, excavated in Montana five years ago “Our
results at the genetic level basically agree with what has been seen in
skeletal data,” John M. Asara of Harvard said in a telephone interview.
“There is more than a 90 percent probability that the grouping of T.
rex with living birds is real.” Asara said.

This will cause a major shakeup in the family tree of vertebrates , as T. rex genetic
makeup overlaps more with ostriches and chickens than such toothy modern reptiles as alligators. Mary H. Schweitzer of North Carolina State University discovered the still smelly preserved soft tissues in the bones.Evolutionary biologists compared the dinosaur protein with
similar protein from several dozen species of modern birds , reptiles and amphibians.

April 22, 2008

If
conceptual art has a point at all, it is to get a rise out of aesthetes who know what's not art before they’ve seen it. Tom Piatak detects none in the work of a Yale arts major he wants
expelled for raising the artistic yuck factor beyond the realm of pickled sharks and plasticized cadavers, but thinks her case
grounds to remind that:

"Chief
Justice Story, the chief constitutional theorist of his day, explained the
purpose of the First Amendment" thus: “The real object of the amendment
was ...to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any
national ecclesiastical establishment which should give to a hierarchy the
exclusive patronage of the national government.”

It is hard to criticize the uncreated. Moss Schvarts art exists in
part only in her imagination, and in this case even shee seems
unsure of what would go on display .But this much is clear- she does not favor the
overthrow of Roe V. Wade, and the responses to her position-- and this
article--- illustrate that rivalry
between Christian sects, and schools of art is alive and well. Many evangelicals, and traditionalists today are
not famously devoted to the separation of powers, let alone church and state,
and were Chief Justice Story still on the earthy bench; his constant vigilance
might be greatly exercised in curbing their zeal, especially since Miss
Schvart’s stunt is calculated to inflame
it . But let it not be said that her performance is original - let us not
forget the Sokal Affair.

A decade ago, cultural
relativists fell for physics professor Alan Sokal's fish slap to the credulity and incoherence of post-modern literary
theory. Contempt for Deconstruction as an academic way of life, led him to
draft, a paper entitled

"Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a
Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"

which appeared in the “Science
Wars" issue of Social Text in
1996. The same month, in another publication, Lingua Franca, Sokal announced the Social Text article was a hoax, calling his own paper:

"a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning
references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense", which was
"structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathematics
and physics"

The response was outrage -
and laughter. A dozen years later, a sophomoric version of the same wheeze has
come out of Yale, and the literally, or rather apocryphally, gory details
have driven cultural critics on the
right to heights of apoplexy worthy of
Captain Ahab, witness Tom Piatak's April 17 piece in Taki's Magazine “Mamas,
Don’t Let Your Babies Grow up To Be Yalies"

Thinking it a fair cop that Anne Coulter's anti- understudy at Yale should
succeed in rumbling the cultural apparat, left , right and center, I commented
:

"Tom, what part of “Sokaled” don’t you
understand?

As
the e’patered party you may now challenge Ms. Shvarts to a pie fight, but along
with a barely passing grade in conceptual art, she gets an A for successfully
transgressing the boundaries of credulity.
Mencken would love it."

But
my fellow columnist would have none of it

"Mr.
Seitz:

Shvarts
doesn’t deserve an “A” for anything. She
either attempted the serial murder of her own children, or is a
publicity-seeking liar. What she did is
not “art” in any reasonable definition of the term. Indeed, the only thing she “transgressed” are
the standards any civilized institution would uphold. I agree with Yale alum John Zmirak: she ought to be expelled."

My objection merely incensed
him into arguing that the scientific terms on which Roe v. Wade in part hinges are subject to redefinition in the service of
religion and law alike- in other words, he began to slide into the cultural
relativism -- and legal activism--he customarily decries:

"There
is no need to amend the Constitution each time the Supreme Court misinterprets
it. Under Article III, Section 2,
Congress has the power to restrict the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court (and
to abolish all inferior courts). Congress also has the power to impeach justices and judges, and issuing
an unconstitutional decision, as Roe v Wade was and is, is a proper grounds for
impeachment.... as I’ve argued

I
don’t quite understand your comment about religion, either. The fact that my views on abortion are
informed by my religious beliefs do not make them illegitimate, nor would they
make illegitimate any properly enacted legislation inspired by those
beliefs. The ACLU’s interpretation of
the First Amendment has more in common with the French and Bolshevik
Revolutions than the American Revolution.

..
Chief Justice Story, the chief constitutional theorist of his day, explained
the purpose of the First Amendment: “The
real object of the amendment was not to countenance, much less to advance,
Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity, but to exclude
all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical
establishment which should give to a hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the
national government.”

I
agree with Chief Justice Story, and not with the leftists who have perverted
the First Amendment to advance what Story termed “infidelity.”

am of course relieved that
the ACLU is not the arbiter of constitutional law, but I am not so sure about Chronicles of Culture either.

It is hard to say how Story
and Marshall would view Miss Schvarts’ bizarre fiction, since ‘novels’ were as
new-fangled to the Founders as conceptual art is today. The Chief Justice’s name on a granite plinth in the Harvard Observatory suggests
he might find astrophysicist Sokal’s antic amusing-. Story’s last public act
was leading the subscription that bought the faculty of arts and sciences the world's most powerful telescope in 1845- an instrument
whose continuing utility amazed Russell Kirk in 1971.

Wondrous was the wisdom of
the founders, but today one fears for Princeton Observatory as much for Yale’s art
department. Some dark and cloudy night,
well-wined Federalist Society students might converge to look through the wrong end of the telescope in hope that the resulting broad view of man's place in the universe will improve
their prospects of a clerkship under Justice Alito.

Stimulating as some find Chronicle of Culture, Taki’s plays a different role. It is a salon des refusees in the face not just of PC, but the intellectual
captivity of National Review ,and the
aesthetic dominion of The New Criterion. Besides,other proponents of conceptual
minimalism, like the Taliban, have put Miss Schvarts efforts at reifying obscenity to shame. It pales before the
demolition of the Great Buddha of Bamiyan, in which the performance artist
known as Mullah Omar overthrew Althuserian conceptions of the linearity of time’s
arrow by showing that dynamite
artistically deployed can not only transform featureless rock into monumental
art, as at Mount Rushmore , but vice versa. Now that’s deconstruction!

It would be unfortunate if
by amplifying Miss Schvarts fame , Tom
Piatak’s essay were to overshadow her
Yale classmate Mr. Hashemi, the former Taliban PR man, when a timely grant
might enable them to devise a joint installation. But that is for the MacArthur Foundation to
decide--let others be friends to philistinism everywhere. We are guardians only
of our own. Can we look forward
to Chronicles giving The New Criterion a run for its money? As a metric, forget the Yale fiasco- count the galleries voluntarily running ads in its
pages.

Craig Ventner will go down in history as heading the project that first sequenced a human genome- his own. That took years and billions , but on its heels comes the announcement in Nature that a Houston consortium has used massively parallel sequencing to put DNA discoverer James Watson on the map. The real news is the cost- only millions. It should fall within range of personal genetic medicine, tuned to your unique make up- including the hundred or more pre-conception DNA mutations that happen en route to you.

April 21, 2008

April 16, 2008

late last night, trying to hold a telephone in one hand and simultaneously condense and check prose against equations with the other, I ended up watching a much-rewritten, but un-fact checked, or science-editor vetted book review slide out of human hands , and into the maw of a great national daily. Reentering mass media globalized since their last appearance, writers used to the self-correcting nature of peer-reviewed science journals should take nothing for granted . Unlike the fish they used to wrap, papers can decay from back page to front, as well as from the head down. Despite Google, fact checking is retreating uptown as fast as Wall Streeet journalists are morphing down market into Murdoch Mode.

Despite a predawn final sending of corrections, I awoke to a predictable result. The gap between the two cultures yawned and swallowed the distinction between voltage and current, distance and velocity , as the midnight oil burned. What emerged was eminently readable, but technically inchaote- but I had another essay in press last night. Unbidden as I slept , the editorial staff at the eight page tabloid weekly of a geophysical society blithely detected and corrected my mis-attribution of a 19th century geology quote they'd never before read.

[thursday]It is 1AM EDT, and I just sent a final correction in to my editor at the WSJ, probably too late to keep an error out of print .I spent yesterday finishing a book review. -" The ten Most Beautiful Experiments" , by George Johnson.

Alas, in the rushed editorial conversation condensing my draft, voltage and current , magnetic force and electrical power, got mixed up, the responsibility is mine and you can see the result in the print edition- i have yet to, but the the electronic edition will be corrected as below before dawn rises over the Hoover Dam: Apologies to EE's who have already drafted angry Letters to the Editor on Al Gore's behalf :

Dear Editor ;

What i was trying to translate into prose and write down with one hand when interrupted

...Joule found 838 pounds falling one foot could
raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree—as could dropping one
pound of water 838 feet: Niagara Falls is warmer at the bottom than at the top.[[He was also shocked to
find that the power of electromagnets increased as the current squared, much as
a falling object's energy increased with the square of time.]]Yet
the batteries he sweated to charge did not grow colder as his motors ran.

April 15, 2008

From Pale Blue Dot to Cold Grey Clot
The European Space agency has generated some alarming pictures of the ring of geostationary debris that is growing to rival the cloud of satellite dandruff already orbiting the Earth closer in.The Agency notesBetween the launch of Sputnik on 4 October 1957 and 1 January 2008,
approximately 4600 launches have placed some 6000 satellites into
orbit, of which about 400 are travelling beyond geostationary orbit or
on interplanetary trajectories.

Today, it is estimated that only
800 satellites are operational - roughly 45 percent of these are both
in LEO and GEO. Space debris comprise the ever-increasing amount of
inactive space hardware in orbit around the Earth as well as fragments
of spacecraft that have broken up, exploded or otherwise become
abandoned. About 50 percent of all trackable objects are due to
in-orbit explosion events (about 200) or collision events (less than
10).

April 14, 2008

"Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,"
a flimsy attempt to discredit Darwinist theory as the cornerstone of
modern biology, reps such a missed opportunity. While roving
interviewer Ben Stein extracts some choice soundbites from scientists
on both sides of the creation-vs.-evolution debate, the film's flippant
approach undermines the seriousness of its discourse, trading less in
facts than in emotional appeals. A probable punching bag for film
critics and evolution proponents alike,"

To add to the film's slapstick tribulations, besides two plagiarism cases, there has been a slip up involving Intelligent design stalwart Maciej Giertych, comedian Ben Stein's Polish second banana in the effort to blame Hitler on Darwin. Ben is presumably just kidding in this Expelled website PR image, but the German Press Agency reports the party run by Giertych's son organized a real live neo-nazi swastika torch parade in 2004. Videoed boogeying at the event, which Poland's Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski condemned as
"scandalous", was Giertych's PA. Nowthat's show business !

April 12, 2008

One reason Phaeton's Reins ' the overview of the Climate Wars by Kerry Emanuel of M.I.T. has graced this blog's sidebar since its inception is Kerry's truly contrarian capacity to change his mind .He's done it again-

In the 1980’s, he warned of thermodynamically driven rise in
hurricane intensity from increasing CO2 , and just a few
weeks before Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans, asserted in a
Nature that statistical evidence linked rising
hurricane energy and warming. Despite the uncertainty in the science, his work accordinly figured in An Inconvenient Truth,

The models are telling us something quite different from what nature
seems to be telling us. There are various interpretations possible,
e.g. a) The big increase in hurricane power over the past 30 years or
so may not have much to do with global warming, or b) The models are
simply not faithfully reproducing what nature is doing. Hard to know
which to believe yet.

The study essentially meshed two kinds of computer models — the
massive global climate simulations used to project long-term
consequences of building greenhouse gases and small high-resolution
simulations of little atmospheric disturbances that can grow into
hurricanes. When hundreds of potential storms were seeded across
warming oceans, some places in some computer runs — like the North
Pacific — saw more activity, but others saw less intensification and
fewer storms.

Emmanuel told the Houston Chronicle :

“There’s still a lot of uncertainty in this problem. The
bulk of the evidence is that hurricane power will go up, but in some
places it will go down.”

April 11, 2008

April 10, 2008

With a twitch of his brimstone detecting nostrils' Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has confirmed Homer & Marge's banishment from the oily nation's airwaves, after a ruling that The Simpsons traduced the Law of Social Responsibility in Radio and Television by being unsuitable for children.

The National Telecommunications Commission said the show pushed "messages that go against the whole education of boys, girls and adolescents", a task the regulatory agency, thinks better delegated to wholesome Sesame Street regulars like David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson, The Simpsons' 11 AM slot having been turned over to reruns of Baywatch

Media watchers are waiting to see if Borat counsels Kazakhstan to follow suit .

Much as it resembles a bad hurricane day on Jupiter , this near life-size image of a soap film domed into a bubble above a heat source eerily reproduces the dynamics of a cyclonic storm on a real planet. You can see it in motion as well

April 08, 2008

Jim Hansen's latest estimate of the sensitivity of climate to approximately doubling CO2 is bound to arouse controversy, so I've revised this precis of past estimates- the original compilation by Levenson did not include Arrhenius second estimate, published a decade after his first set this Victorian roller coaster in motion.

19th century climate sensitivity estimates were woefully uncertain, meandering over a range of nearly ten degrees F per decade.

But thanks to modern science -- 112 years of continuous theoretical progress, ever more accurate instruments, exponentially growing computer power and sophisticated climate models, expert estimates can now shift by nearly ten degrees F in a single year! Hence the importance of the latest result.

Hansen's estimate enables Al Gore to declare that CO2 sensitivity being worse than it was in 1896, the debate has been over for three centuries!

Who would be so cynical as to point out that starting in 2005, the misallocation of emissions quotas by the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme led to a collapse in the
price of carbon permits--a market Al has been instrumental in establishing -- from $40 to 40 cents?

At which price no
incentive to reduce emissions exists. Except for newer and more elegant estimates of climate sensitivity , conveniently blasting off in the direction carbon traders would like to see the market travel. Stay tuned for the next exciting statistic, and the sequel to Six Degrees coming soon to a PBS channel near you.

Right now I have to run off to Harvard's Kennedy School for Prices vs. Quantities vs. Bankable Quantities for Stock Pollutants by William Pizer of Resources for the Future; next week's seminar will be Measuring the Distributional Impacts of Carbon Pricing http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k19826.

April 05, 2008

"Since this paper doesn’t define the word “innovation,” it is very hard to tell what precisely the authors’ point is (other than to lead us into the technology trap). ..this is characteristic of Pielke’s work —he doesn’t define terms specifically enough to make policy-relevant conclusions.' [emphasis in the original]

...all the regular readers of this blog know why the technology trap is dangerous (it leads to delay, which is fatal to the planet’s livability)...failing to stabilize well below, say, 700 parts per million of CO2 ppm is really, really, really suicidal ....So what is the point of the piece? To convince people the situation is hopeless? [Nature actually runs a side piece on the commentary titled, “Are the IPCC scenarios ‘unachievable’? — and people call me an alarmist!]."

While Romm neglects to define 'fatal ' or ' suicidal' in his essay, it elicited a reader response some may find alarming .

" it might take, not only media campaigns like Al Gore’s recently announced advertising platform, but also...some climate protesters ...might... set themselves on fire with gasoline in Washington or New York, in front of the UN building.... to say to the world community: “We must stop killing the Earth now !”

Such protest-suicides...have such visual power as to make people who are not convinced do a re-think...about... the USA still being in denial about climate change realities." [ 'Dabby Bloom ' April 3rd, 2008 at 1:49 am]

April 01, 2008

" Nassau :The water is turquoise, the houses ...
cotton candy pink.
How good..How interesting our cruisers are ... A Disney
ship's horn played 'When You Wish Upon a Star '...
William Kristol… and Fred Barnes… procured.. .magnetic bracelets
to cure motion sickness… It's a good look.”

Tortola “ Yo
ho ho and a bottle of rum! Turquoise water and tiny houses…

St. Martin A few dollars procured a
wide variety of fruity, girly rum drinks...Then …the islands of adventure...
and back to Fort Lauderdale...Hubbard Glacier let a dog team pull you. View holy paintings of the Czarist days, visit recuperating eagles ...stroll... Ketchikan's red light districtAre only reinforced by the Log of this
years Voyage, already found floating in a bottle by Bermuda Triangle fisherfolk--